So it’s important that you are perceived to be honest with your staff
Trying to quantify how much money it costs your business when the staff feel like they are being cheated is hard to calculate and even tougher to justify. Forget the facts; in today’s environment perception is everything.
Years ago, as a young service manager, I took a roasting at one of our monthly managers’ meetings for having an out-of-control policy account. After the meeting I approached the secretary treasurer and asked if I could get a breakdown of what went into that account. The answer was short and emphatic: “NO!”
The excuses were, “I am too busy” and, “You are not allowed access to this account. I asked why, feeling like Oliver Twist asking for more.
At the next meeting, guess what? The account was still running high, but this time I had kept my own ledger of all the policy dollars that I had signed for and asked a couple of more pointed questions:
1.
If I am supposed to be responsible for this account, why aren’t I allowed to see what is in it?
2.
Who is spending dollars in this account that I never authorized?
You would think my dealer would have been pleased that he had a manager actively concerned about how much of his money
was being spent and who was spending it,
but looking at his face I knew I was wrong. I thought it might cost me my job!
Not an isolated incident
I’m not the only one to have been faced with similar circumstances. In one city dealership, where both the service manager and service advisors were paid on the bottom line, they were upset that, after finishing a record month, it was not reflected on the bottom line. After a lot of questions and research it turned out that the general manager’s pay plan included his golfing fees, which all went into the service department’s expenses because they had just finished a great month.
I asked him if he thought it was right having hard-working service advisors paying for him to play golf, which turned into a heated argument. In my books, what happened might not have been theft or fraud but it was close and far from being right. The following month the service department numbers took a dive which cost the store a lot more than golfing fees.
One of the more common questions from service managers is, “Why is it that when we produce 2,000 hours the bottom line is the same as when we produce 3,000 hours?” Obviously some expenses do increase when you sell more hours – bonuses for example – but in most cases the bottom line should show an increase.
Our advice was, talk to your ST or your dealer and find out why the expenses shot up out of line on what was supposed to be a great bottom-line month, the answer came back: “We tried.”
Another question service managers frequently ask is, “Why did my personnel expense increase so much when I still have the same amount of staff on the same pay plan.” This is a good question, but finding out why is often like trying to pull hens’ teeth.
Deliver what you promise
At one store, the dealer told us the morale of his staff seemed to be a major concern so we decided to try to build some fun in the business with spiffs, but the staff were less than enthusiastic. As it turned out, several months before, the staff had been made promises of rewards for reaching targets which they achieved, but they had never received what they were promised.
We told this to the dealer who became very agitated and appeared not to understand the cost of not living up to a commitment. One of my old mentors used to tell me that, “commitment without follow through = BS.”
We recently implemented an up-sell program for some lubrication technicians. This was being paid for by both the parts and service departments and it had the positive effect of increasing both parts and labour sales. But we were dismayed to find out that, almost a full month later the staff had not been paid. The attitude of the ST appeared to be, “I don’t get a bonus so why should they? I will get to it, but I am busy now.”
We know you are smart enough to know that staff work for more than just money. Giving them feedback and the occasional “thank you” also goes a long way. But we have lost count of how many times we hear from employees who have produced a great month and don’t even know it. It often appears that we are fast to convey bad news but neglect to communicate the good, which does little to motivate a team.
Need for transparency
The message is that staff today expect answers to their questions. Telling a manager that one of his accounts is high without giving him or her access to the account just won’t cut it anymore, if you expect that person to perform or care.
Capitalism is a great system providing we don’t lose our integrity. Even our politicians are starting to find out that people want to know what is in their travel expense accounts. Some managers, because they feel they are not being treated fairly, give up and quit whilst others give up and stay, which is even more expensive.
The question is, how much transparency do you give your managers, when they ask, “Why can’t I find out what is going into this account?”
